Mazzi, Pollock on the year ahead; more technology in student’s hands

By LENNY C. LEPOLA

News Assis­tant Man­ag­ing Editor

Big Wal­nut Local School Dis­trict Super­in­ten­dent Steve Mazzi said there’s always a lot of excite­ment that comes with a new school year. Stu­dents are happy about mov­ing up a grade and even on to new build­ings, teach­ers are rested and ready for another year in the class­room, main­te­nance and cus­to­dial staff have had the oppor­tu­nity to update and ren­o­vate facil­i­ties and grounds over the sum­mer months; but Mazzi said the most excit­ing aspect of enter­ing the 2012–13 school year is hav­ing a sur­viv­able budget.

Dur­ing to 2009-10 school year dis­trict staff at all lev­els had been reduced to bare bones, many elec­tive course offer­ings had been cut from the cur­ricu­lum, pay-to-play ath­letic fees were increased and the fam­ily cap was elim­i­nated, art and phys­i­cal edu­ca­tion was taken away from ele­men­tary school stu­dents and the district’s music pro­gram was saved by a last-minute anony­mous donation.

After two pre­vi­ous tries at the polls, vot­ers finally approved a five-year, 7.5-mil emer­gency oper­at­ing levy in Novem­ber of 2010, allow­ing the school dis­trict to begin rebuild­ing dur­ing the 2011-12 school year.

“We’re going into the sec­ond year with our pre­vi­ous finan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties under con­trol,” Mazzi said dur­ing a brief inter­view in his new office at Big Wal­nut Inter­me­di­ate School on Baugh­man Street in Sun­bury. “But we con­stantly watch our finances because we never know what the state will throw at us or what will hap­pen to prop­erty tax. In every deci­sion we make today we keep in mind what we’ve been through since March of 2009 and our strug­gle to get a levy passed.”

Mazzi said the bright side of the levy strug­gle has been the district’s renewed focus on the impor­tance of fis­cal respon­si­bil­ity to stu­dents, their par­ents and other mem­bers of the community.

“We’re leaner and we’re much more trans­par­ent because of the con­cerns vot­ers expressed dur­ing the levy cam­paigns, and that tighter bud­get and increased trans­parency can only be a good thing for the dis­trict,” Mazzi said. “We always keep focused on our dis­trict goals — com­mu­ni­ca­tions, facil­ity and stu­dent pop­u­la­tion growth, and aca­d­e­mic excel­lence — but while we do that we’re always look­ing for ways to be more fis­cally responsible.”

Mazzi said mov­ing the district’s admin­is­tra­tive offices from the Galena Build­ing to the Baugh­man Street inter­me­di­ate school build­ing is a per­fect exam­ple of mak­ing a move that both bet­ter serves the district’s mis­sion, and saves money.

The school dis­trict owns six school build­ings, one bus facil­ity and the moth­balled Har­ri­son Street build­ing. Mem­bers of the board of edu­ca­tion decided to close the Galena Build­ing because of mount­ing main­te­nance costs to keep that aging struc­ture hab­it­able. With the move to the Baugh­man Street build­ing nearly com­plete the Galena build­ing will be auc­tioned off and the pro­ceeds used for over­due cap­i­tal improvements.

When asked about the cost of main­tain­ing a multi-building cam­pus spread around the com­mu­nity, Mazzi said upkeep never stops.

“It’s like the main­te­nance of a fam­ily home mul­ti­plied many times,” Mazzi said. “We have roofs to take care of, con­crete and black­top to main­tain, HVAC sys­tems. When we had bud­get prob­lems a lot of that was let go; there were some things that dete­ri­o­rated. Now we’re work­ing to get back on track.

“Then you throw in that we have to mow our grounds in the sum­mer­time and plow our roads and park­ing lots in the win­ter — it’s like run­ning a big busi­ness,” Mazzi con­tin­ued. “Like any busi­ness with real estate assets we have to stay on top of a rea­son­able main­te­nance sched­ule or things dete­ri­o­rate and cost more to replace or repair in the long run; and that’s part of being fis­cally respon­si­ble after every­thing we’ve been through.”

Dis­trict Direc­tor of Aca­d­e­mic Achieve­ment Angie Pol­lock is focused more on how finances impact aca­d­e­mics. She said that even though the Ohio Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion will not release state report cards until late August, pre­lim­i­nary scores from the ODE show improve­ments over last year’s performance.

But the play­ing field is chang­ing, Pol­lock said, with new math and Eng­lish lan­guage arts stan­dards com­mon between the states, but com­ing down from the national level; while the other two stan­dards — sci­ence and social stud­ies — are tran­si­tion­ing into what are called Revised Ohio Aca­d­e­mic Con­tent Stan­dards. The dis­trict is in the mid­dle of a four-year tran­si­tion to the new standards.

As the dis­trict tran­si­tions to the new stan­dards, tech­nol­ogy is also being upgraded. Pol­lock said the dis­trict wants stu­dents to become more pro­fi­cient with the tech­nolo­gies they will need for online assess­ments that will soon be in place, and as their edu­ca­tion con­tin­ues at the col­lege level and in the workforce.

“Tech­nol­ogy has been upgraded district-wide, and we’ve added tech­nol­ogy for stu­dents to use in all build­ings,’ Pol­lock said. “We’re mov­ing toward online assess­ments, so we’ve really tried to focus on tech­nol­ogy being in stu­dents hands – more smart boards, tablet labs, WiFi in each build­ing and cloud-based con­tent so we can move towards the Bring Your Own Device concept.

“We’ve been able to use some of our bond money to pur­chase new lit­er­acy mate­ri­als — read­ing and writ­ing text­books with stu­dent edi­tions online so stu­dents will be able to access text­book mate­r­ial online from their home com­put­ers,” Pol­lock con­tin­ued. “Our teach­ers had six dif­fer­ent lit­er­acy days of train­ing over the sum­mer, so they’ll be very well pre­pared for the new text­books and tech­nol­ogy; and we’ll have addi­tional tech­nol­ogy ses­sions for teach­ers to inte­grate more appro­pri­ate use of tech­nol­ogy into their teaching.”

Mazzi said tech­nol­ogy pur­chases are another area where the dis­trict bal­ances stu­dent need with fis­cal responsibility.

“We’re keep­ing pace so our stu­dents have the tech­nol­ogy in their hands to make them suc­cess­ful when they go on to the next stage of their edu­ca­tion or out into the work­force,” Mazzi said. “But every deci­sion we make we ask our­selves: Is this the fis­cally respon­si­ble thing to do? We ask our­selves what can we do now, and what can’t we do, and what do we have to put off to do in the future. And while we’re answer­ing all of those ques­tions we keep our levy promise — to make the levy last five years — out in front.”

Posted by Gary Henery on Aug 15 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.